Ernst Introduces Legislation to Defund Planned Parenthood

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa introduced legislation in the Senate Wednesday to prohibit federal funding for Planned Parenthood after the organization received COVID-19 relief funds.

At least $120 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans were provided to affiliates of Planned Parenthood in 2020 and 2021 contrary to “applicable affiliation rules and size standards” during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a Dec. 17 letter that Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky sent to then-Small Business Administration Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman. Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation that her legislation would ensure that the non-profit organization, known for promoting abortion, would not receive taxpayer funds.

“The nation’s largest abortion provider should not be receiving a dime in federal funding,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Planned Parenthood already got caught with their hand in the cookie jar siphoning off millions in COVID aid designated for mom-and-pop shops. I am standing up for the most vulnerable among us, the unborn, and ensuring that women and babies are supported instead of abortion.”

The Susan B. Anthony List gave Ernst an A+ grade on its scorecard for the term that started on Jan. 3, 2021. She received the same grade for her first term, which started in 2015.

Ernst’s legislation says that “no Federal funds may be made available to Planned Parenthood Federation of America, or to any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, successors, or clinics.”

Planned Parenthood of Central and Western New York touted receiving a $2.6 million fully forgivable loan via the Paycheck Protection Program in a 2021 newsletter article announcing the loan had been forgiven.

“On May 19, 2020, SBA notified a number of PPFA affiliates that they had wrongfully applied for 38 PPP loans totaling more than $80 million dollars,” Paul wrote in the Dec. 17 letter. “SBA determined that these local affiliates of PPFA were ineligible for PPP loans under the applicable affiliation rules and size standards and that the loans they received should be returned.”

“Despite this determination, the SBA approved further loans in 2021 totally nearly $40 million,” Paul wrote. “Further, you allowed at least 34 Planned Parenthood PPP loans to be forgiven.”

The group has filed legal action against restrictions on abortion in multiple red states, including challenging South Carolina’s “heartbeat” law and has also secured taxpayer funding from Missouri via a court ruling. The state supreme court upheld a lower court’s ruling that the measure to defund Planned Parenthood violated a state constitutional provision and the organization’s right to equal protection.

The organization also called virginity a “made up concept” that was “created simply to control and shame people,” while also claiming the term was not “inclusive” of the LGBT community.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, held many racist views and made statements disparaging some minorities, including saying that Australian aboriginals were “the lowest known species of the human family” in her 1913 book “What Every Girl Should Know.” She also stated in a 1939 letter that she didn’t want the fact she sought “to exterminate the Negro population” to “go out.”

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